Summary

Percy DeForest Spock has a successful writing career, a new boyfriend, and is just settling into life in Bloomington, Indiana when a knock at the door turns his world upside down. Waiting on the other side is Caspian, his 15-year-old, Goth nephew. Caspian has just lost his parents, his home, and his been ripped away from the only life he has ever known. Can the mismatched pair make a new life together or are they doomed from the start?

Tyler is excited to meet Percy's nephew, but Caspian is nothing like Tyler expected. Caspian is rude, angry, and a complete and total jerk. He hates everyone and everything and soon the boys are at each other's throats. Just when Tyler begins to hate Caspian with a passion an incident occurs that has the potential to change everything.

A simple children's book narrated by a robot

I winced. I cried. I moaned. I cried.

Imagine a book that was a script for a children's play where the student's would walk onto a stage and just talk to each other in a flat monotonous tone. The description in this book is so minimal. I wonder if you can copy and paste it into anywhere in the world and it wouldn't matter. My first line refers to the way the book is mostly verbatim. It's mostly speech or flow of thoughts from one character to another. E.g "I said this, he said that." It's dull. The amount of times name dropping happens is mind-numbing. Thus, be prepared to be bored.

The chapter names are named after the character who will be speaking for the whole chapter. So if you ever wanted to go back to a certain chapter, good luck with that since the chapter names are repeated.

The characters are variable which is alright but some are very stereotypical. As if it was a Dungeons and Dragons game and each role needed to mentioned. A flamboyant slut, a crippled jock, a black stud, a handsome straight. This is alright but I feel the characters could have had a bit more background.

Tyler and Percy and most of the other characters, all blend into one rational person. And with the narration, they all sound the same boring dad/responsible and rational figure that 90% of this book becomes a lecture on how to deal with relationships and loss.

There was one glimpse of hope within the last 40 minutes of the audiobook. There was a description of a river. And I was actually surprised that some description was made to give context of surrounding. And actually the last 40 minutes seemed to be the better part of the book. All the previous seemed to be like a linear stacking of story where nothing exciting was happening and the past keeps getting repeated.

TLDR: You could probably skip this one.

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Overall

3 out of 5 stars

Performance

4 out of 5 stars

Story

2 out of 5 stars

Orlando

17-07-13

Sweet enough story

Percy De Forrest Spock - uhmn, queue the Star Trek reference. The story takes a while to get going, and seems to come together in the final moments of the book. If you're looking for something not to get too invested in, this is the book for you

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Overall

3 out of 5 stars

Performance

2 out of 5 stars

Story

3 out of 5 stars

Keith G

07-09-17

Meh

Cute story concept and outline. Below average execution. Does this guy have an editor?

Roeder tends to over-write things that a better author would let the reader's imagination handle - like the physical process of walking to, getting in, and riding around in a car. Those words would have better been used in character development.

Also, the duo point of view story telling seems too limiting for this writer's level of craft. The book is only okay, but I bought it at markdown so there's that.